this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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Electric Vehicles
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brother, i'll bite. FYI Toyota doesn't give a fuck about EVs at all, they kinda tried with bz4x but yea..they're still betting on hydrogen, even the other combustion head BMW offered to rework their z4 as supra just to take a peek on their hydrogen tech.
I still don’t understand their push for hydrogen. Electricity is ubiquitous and can be deployed most anywhere at varying degrees. Hydrogen would require all new infrastructure and distribution facilities that would basically emulate what gas is doing.
They tried it in California and it was a monumental flop.
Batteries used to be pretty bad, so I expect they thought "since people already go to stations for petrol, they will be fine going to stations for hydrogen." Maybe they even thought they could get into the production/sales side of hydrogen, and get to reap huge profits from controlling a variable commodity like gasoline.
Turns out batteries got way better, and people enjoy fuelling their vehicles with a simple plug at home. Some people also gladly make the "fuel" with cheap solar panels. Electricity is just way cheaper and more adaptable, so people are making a pretty simple choice by opting to use it instead of hydrogen.
Imagine it's the year 2000, 25 years ago now (deargod). The idea back then was that you switch over to Blue hydrogen (still sourced from Fossil Fuels) and build out that market for Green Hydrogen. As a usability switchover, it's very close to Petrol as you can have petrol companies make and sell the hydrogen, so for the customers, everything is the same.
But, everyone dragged their feet on this. The government was successfully convinced that CC wasn't real, companies (Toyota, Honda) had Hydrogen with their loser teams that didn't make money, no one wanted to invest. Now we're 25 years later, the whole world has changed, but Toyota couldn't really change strategy because they never invested in BEVs (they wanted Hydrogen), but because Hydrogen also failed (and the ship has sailed on that now. BEVs are literally more convenient now) they're stuck.
To succeed now they need to admit they fucked up really bad, and that's going to kill their stock price, and that's going to basically end the company so they can't switch over to BEV investment this late in the game.
They’re gonna have to rip off that bandaid at some point or just risk being left being. Their stubbornness will actually hurt them more long term.
Hydrogen? I'm not a close observer of the auto world, but it feels like Toyota went with hybrids a long time ago and don't see a reason to change that.
Yeah, they did. But Hydrogen was their bet for the next step after hybrids. They just have a chicken-egg problem with it, and much like Sony, they became overly content and arrogant once they were the market leader in green vehicle tech.
As highly as I thought about Toyotas over the years (the cars, not the company), I'm afraid this might be their "Kodak moment".